Google has finally announced some specifics about the browser they are developing -- and they've done so with a comic made by Scott McLeod, the author of Understanding Comics. It is a pretty cool read packing a lot of technical information in to a form really easy for a non-technical reader to digest, and for me it really highlighted how totally lousy almost all technology journalism is.(Updated with this official Google link to the comic.)
4 comments:
Am I the only one who interprets their multiple processes is better argument as them saying: "Writing good code that doesn't leak memory is hard, so we won't try, we will leave it up to the OS to clean up for us."
Maybe I'm crazy, but every OS I've use seriously bogs down when you get over a few hundred processes. With one process per document, plus one process for each plugin, plus separate processes to run javascript and java in, I can imagine just the browser using 200 processes.
By offloading all the 'hard' work onto the OS, I think chrome is just going to stress and crash the OS a lot.
Hopefully I'm totally wrong and just don't understand how brilliant the google developers are.
No, I think you are fundamentally correct, but that doesn't necessarily mean that Google isn't making a good real-world decision.
Don't forget that because of the things people want to accomplish these days with their embedded code, it basically has to support enough functionality to allow the developer of the embedded code to shoot themselves in the foot. This is more to protect against those third-party developers than it is confessing that Google / Microsoft / Mozilla can't write a browser that doesn't blow.
In any case, real quality OSes should be able to handle amazing process thrashing. We were barfing up and stripping down zillions of them on our Alphas 15 years ago with no issues; the *nix family is good at that stuff. Windows is catching up.
Not being one of the developers I'm not in a position to "confess" it, but as a user, I'm willing to stipulate that both Microsoft and Mozilla "can't write a browser that doesn't blow." IE is abysmal for all the long-understood reasons. Each release of Firefox gets slower, more bloated, and more crash-prone (especially when Java is involved) to the point that I'm having a hard time telling the difference anymore. The source distribution is 36 megabytes. Sweet Jesus!
I haven't tried Chrome yet, but if it only sucks a little, that's an improvement over the status quo as far as I'm concerned.
It sucks a little but there is a lot I like about it. It seems to be, in general, much faster, but kind of like NovaNET as we improved the infrastructure, it also feels choppy or hangy. The speed accentuates the moments when it gets stuck. The feed back that it is busy is inconsistent. I have a sense that it isn't playing nicely at times, since I'm noticing a few odd hangs using my system in general.
It gives up on sites pretty quickly leading to failed page loads for sites that I know are not "temporarily unavailable" like espn.com. It also fails on some heavily scripted sites and I'm never completely sure I know how it is handling scripts/popups. I've seen a few break downs, including one I didn't expect trying to signout one google calendar to get in another.
The start page and the incognito options are useful.
Post a Comment